The old man in the picture is named Mona Randolph, from Kansas City, USA, and this yellow iron box is a machine used to help her breathe, known as the "iron lung".
The poliovirus can cause devastating damage to the human central nervous system, leading to permanent disability. In every 100 patients paralyzed by polio, two to 10 more die because of paralysis of the respiratory muscles and the inability to breathe.
Mona in her youth
In September 1956, Mona graduated from college and had just joined the workforce.
The age of 20 was supposed to be the beginning of a prosperous, prosperous life, but one afternoon in September of that year, Mona suddenly felt unwell and developed severe flu symptoms: fever, severe headaches and neck pain, and at first she and her family thought that she might just have the flu.
By the next day, she felt very weak and the left side of her body was almost out of control.
By the third day, she was unable to get out of bed on her own and it was very difficult to breathe.
Mona was rushed to St. Luke's Hospital, where she was almost unconscious, where she was diagnosed with polio, where doctors put her in an "iron lung" and saved her life, leaving her with a permanent disability.
For a young man who has just turned 20, this is an incredibly cruel thing.
Invented by two scientists at Harvard University in 1927, this respirator, known as the "iron lung", has saved many lives during the polio pandemic in the United States, but the machine is also very bulky, need to lie in it to use, bringing great inconvenience and psychological devastation to the lives of patients.
Because some patients need to lie in the machine 24 hours a day, the machine needs to keep running at all times, and once the power is cut off, it is fatal to them.
This machine drives a pressure pump through a motor to change the air pressure in the closed compartment, thus forcing the lungs to expand and contract, simulating natural breathing, the iron lung was originally used before helping patients regain their breathing ability, but some patients' respiratory muscles have been completely paralyzed and need to rely on iron lungs for life to survive.
Depending on the strength of the respiratory muscles, some of them even have to stay inside 24 hours a day.
Mona spent 20 years without a machine, after which a polio recurrence forced her to return to her iron lungs again. She has been in the iron lung for a total of 32 years now.
By 2018, she was one of only three polio patients in the world who still use iron lungs.
Although it is possible to breathe with frog breathing without the help of a machine, it is more difficult.
At night, her husband Mark and a good friend of hers would use a crane to put her into an iron lung, which by the 1980s had become obsolete and produced smaller, lighter ventilators, but because many patients had severely deformed spines and could not stand normally, they could only continue to use old-fashioned iron barrel ventilators.
Although Mona can use this new, lighter, lower-cost machine in a wheelchair, it is far from the old iron lung that makes her breathe more naturally and comfortably, and the iron barrel ventilator was discontinued as early as 1970, so it is difficult to find new replacement parts, and the cost of maintaining the normal use of the machine every year is almost equivalent to the cost of buying a new car.
Mona, unfortunately contracted polio at a young age, was fortunate to have lived a rich, fulfilling life and a loving husband who served on the board of the local Disability Cause Alliance and devoted her life to disability assistance.
Mona died on 18 February 2019 at the age of 83 from long-term complications of polio.
American experimental medicine scientist Jonas Edward Salk
In 1955, the American experimental medicine scientist Jonas Edward Salk invented the polio vaccine, known as the "father of polio vaccine", in order to make the vaccine more widely used in the world, Salk did not patent the polio vaccine, nor did he use his invention for profit.
Salk in the lab
However, at that time, this vaccine was basically only available to children, and adults like Mona were rarely vaccinated, and adults were also easily infected.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Roosevelt, the famous president of American history, also suffered from polio in 1921 at the age of 39, resulting in lower limb disability and spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, about 35,000 people in the United States developed polio each year from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, and that number began to decline sharply after a nationwide campaign to vaccinate children began, and by 1979, the CDC announced that polio had been completely eradicated nationwide.
With the widespread use of polio vaccines around the world since 1955, parents have largely stopped worrying about their children being affected by this terrible disease.
Gu Fangzhou and "Sugar Pills"
The most commonly used polio vaccine in the mainland is what we often call "sugar pills", its inventors are known as "the father of Chinese polio vaccine" and "the father of sugar pills" - Gu Fangzhou, Gu Fangzhou's grandfather has made great contributions to the elimination of polio in China, please remember this name that benefits countless children.
A small sugar pill has protected the health of hundreds of millions of children and made them experience the pain of one less injection.
By 2000, the mainland had also declared the complete eradication of polio.
A tribute to the scientists who have dedicated themselves to the cause of human health, who are the people we should remember the most!
Thank you for reading, if you like my article, please give me a valuable thumbs up.
I wish you a prosperous New Year and all the best!